EXIT NEGOTIATIONS

[Pannonian]

he has the mandate of te 2017 ge.

the arrogance!

What is the Tory majority from 2017, BTW?

[Furunculus]

can they command a majority in parliament?

if not, we can have another ge and he'll get one then.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

What is the Tory majority from 2017, BTW?

It doesn't work like that and you know it.

Stop validating Boris Johnson's ego.

[Pannonian]

It doesn't work like that and you know it.

Stop validating Boris Johnson's ego.

Governments exist to pass laws. Laws are passed through Parliament with a majority of votes. Can Johnson command a majority to pass his desired laws?

[Furunculus]

If he can't, he'll call a general election and get one.

[Pannonian]

can they command a majority in parliament?

if not, we can have another ge and he'll get one then.

Are you looking forward to a Johnson majority?

[Don Corleone]

Boris Johnson announced this morning that negotiations over Brexit would not continue until the Irish Backstop was removed from the discussions. Looks like DUP is punching more than their weight.

I know there is no hard and fast answer to this, only opinions. But I'm curious what the UK folks and the ROI folks think Arlene Foster is whispering in BoJo's ear right now? Is this simply putting the red line on the Province border and not in the Irish Sea? Or is this an attempt to undo Good Friday? Foster is a devoted Paisley disciple, correct?

[Furunculus]

Are you looking forward to a Johnson majority?

he is a middle of the road non ideological tory, employing cummings whose life goal is learning and high performance organisation's.

yes.

as an alternative to a corbynista government..... hell yes with bells on!

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Boris Johnson announced this morning that negotiations over Brexit would not continue until the Irish Backstop was removed from the discussions. Looks like DUP is punching more than their weight.

I know there is no hard and fast answer to this, only opinions. But I'm curious what the UK folks and the ROI folks think Arlene Foster is whispering in BoJo's ear right now? Is this simply putting the red line on the Province border and not in the Irish Sea? Or is this an attempt to undo Good Friday? Foster is a devoted Paisley disciple, correct?

Revd. Paisley was devoted to the Peace Process, strange as that may sound.

[Pannonian]

he is a midddle of the road non ideoligical tory, empliying cummings whose life goal is learning and high performance organisation's.

yes.

as an alternative to a corbynista government..... hell yes with bells on!

Didn't you blame everyone but yourself for May's deal not passing? Johnson voted against on all three occasions.

[Furunculus]

your whining again. every response is always a tangent away from the reply you quote.
like you keep trying to catch me out with some clever logical ruse. failing, and moving on to lay the next 'trap' in the hope i will fall into it.
if you were dealing with a half wit it might work, but that is the level we're operating at here.

but to directly answer your next tangent:

yes he did. as did most of labour. now we're looking at a harder brexit than we were heading to with may's deal.
pleased with yourself?
i did my bit - made my compromise - and things are now moving in a direction i am comfortable with. i'm not sure why you're looking for outrage from me...

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

One notes that both the EU and many in the UK insist they will not support "No Deal" and yet they refuse to negotiate any substantive change to "the deal".

This raises the question of how, exactly, we are supposed to leave with a deal if "the deal" cannot be reintroduced to Parliament this session.

[Pannonian]

One notes that both the EU and many in the UK insist they will not support "No Deal" and yet they refuse to negotiate any substantive change to "the deal".

This raises the question of how, exactly, we are supposed to leave with a deal if "the deal" cannot be reintroduced to Parliament this session.

When May set her red lines, the rules of the EU meant the deal she eventually got was the deal she was always going to get. Put data through a function, you can calculate the result that's going to come out. Why are you complaining about the result? If you don't like the result, start with different data.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

When May set her red lines, the rules of the EU meant the deal she eventually got was the deal she was always going to get. Put data through a function, you can calculate the result that's going to come out. Why are you complaining about the result? If you don't like the result, start with different data.

Firstly, politics is not a science.

Secondly - that is not remotely my point.

At this stage there are only two options - Remain and No Deal?

So - why are both Britain and the EU continuing to demand the other move their position and why are pundits supporting this charade?

[Pannonian]

Firstly, politics is not a science.

Secondly - that is not remotely my point.

At this stage there are only two options - Remain and No Deal?

So - why are both Britain and the EU continuing to demand the other move their position and why are pundits supporting this charade?

The EU is rules based. If you want certain conditions, then in the main these are the options open. They published a map at the beginning detailing the conditions that a UK government may demand and what possible options there may be as a result of these conditions. May's deal fitted that map to a tee, as everyone paying attention could have predicted. Make certain demands, and you can have those but you'll rule out certain avenues.

The EU haven't demanded that the UK move their position. Quite the opposite. They've repeatedly said that the deal is the result of concluded negotiations which they entered into in good faith, and they'll keep up their end, and it's up to the UK to keep up theirs. There is no further movement. They've even disbanded the negotiation team. It's only the UK who's repeatedly demanded that the other side move their position.

If it does come down to Remain and No Deal, presumably you'd opt for No Deal, and blame the EU.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

The EU is rules based. If you want certain conditions, then in the main these are the options open. They published a map at the beginning detailing the conditions that a UK government may demand and what possible options there may be as a result of these conditions. May's deal fitted that map to a tee, as everyone paying attention could have predicted. Make certain demands, and you can have those but you'll rule out certain avenues.

The EU haven't demanded that the UK move their position. Quite the opposite. They've repeatedly said that the deal is the result of concluded negotiations which they entered into in good faith, and they'll keep up their end, and it's up to the UK to keep up theirs. There is no further movement. They've even disbanded the negotiation team. It's only the UK who's repeatedly demanded that the other side move their position.

If it does come down to Remain and No Deal, presumably you'd opt for No Deal, and blame the EU.

You're not listening.

The EU says it wants "the Deal" and the UK must "get on with" passing "the deal.

This is clearly not going to happen before October 31st - but the EU has refused further extensions.

So - why does the EU claim it wants a deal so badly and yet refuse to countenance further negotiation?

The truth is either that the EU does not particularly want a deal, it is not particularly concerned about a "hard border" in Northern Ireland, or that the EU does not understand the situation in the UK and believes we will buckle at the last possible second.

Then you have all those in Parliament who say they want "a Deal" but not "the Deal" despite the EU saying "there is only The Deal".

So, are both sides stupid, insane, dishonest, or all of the above?

[Pannonian]

You're not listening.

The EU says it wants "the Deal" and the UK must "get on with" passing "the deal.

This is clearly not going to happen before October 31st - but the EU has refused further extensions.

So - why does the EU claim it wants a deal so badly and yet refuse to countenance further negotiation?

The truth is either that the EU does not particularly want a deal, it is not particularly concerned about a "hard border" in Northern Ireland, or that the EU does not understand the situation in the UK and believes we will buckle at the last possible second.

Then you have all those in Parliament who say they want "a Deal" but not "the Deal" despite the EU saying "there is only The Deal".

So, are both sides stupid, insane, dishonest, or all of the above?

This does not compute. The EU has said the negotiations are complete. The deal is the best the UK can have, given its own demands, and given the rules of the EU and treaties to which the UK is subject to (such as the GFA). Why do you equate the deal with further negotiation? The UK set its own rules, the EU has its own rules. The two were put together to find a position that satisfies both. May's deal is the result.

Also, why are you solely blaming the EU for the NI-RoI border? The issue is a bilateral agreement between the UK and the RoI. The EU guarantees it, but it's not just the EU that guarantees it, as the US has also (in the last week AFAIK) also guaranteed it. Yet you blame only the EU, not the US, not the UK. Again, it is not brinkmanship as you portray it. There are rules, and either the UK abides by these rules (the bilateral treaty between the UK and the RoI), or it can ignore those rules and take the hit to its international relations that being a rogue state that does not keep agreements involves.

When everything is at the instigation of the UK, and the EU is but one of a number of parties involved, why do Brexiteers still insist on blaming the EU and the EU only?

[Montmorency]

Literary Boris:

"Here, as always, Johnson claims the privileges of the clown while exercising the power of a politician."

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

This raises the two central questions about Johnson—does he believe any of his own claims, and do his followers in turn believe him? In both cases, the answer is yes, but only in the highly qualified way that an actor inhabits his role and an audience knowingly accepts the pretense. Johnson’s appeal lies precisely in the creation of a comic persona that evades the distinction between reality and performance.

The Greek philosophers found akrasia mysterious—why would people knowingly do the wrong thing? But Johnson knows the answer: they do so, in England at least, because knowingness is essential to being included. You have to be “in on the joke”—and Johnson has shown just how far some English people will go in order not to look like they are not getting it. The anthropologist Kate Fox, in her classic study Watching the English, suggested that a crucial rule of the national discourse is what she called The Importance of Not Being Earnest: “At the most basic level, an underlying rule in all English conversation is the proscription of ‘earnestness.’” Johnson has played on this to perfection—he knows that millions of his compatriots would rather go along with his outrageous fabrications than be accused of the ultimate sin of taking things too seriously.

“Boris being Boris” (the phrase that has long been used to excuse him) is an act, a turn, a traveling show. Johnson’s father, Stanley, was fired from his job at the World Bank in 1968 when he submitted a satiric proposal for a $100 million loan to Egypt to build three new pyramids and a sphinx. But the son cultivated in England an audience more receptive to the half-comic, half-convincing notion that the EU might be just such an absurdist enterprise.

What he honed in his Brussels years is the practice of political journalism (and then of politics itself) as Monty Python sketch. He invented a version of the EU as a gigantic Ministry of Silly Walks, in which crazed bureaucrats with huge budgets develop ever more pointlessly complicated gaits. (In the original sketch, the British bureaucrats are trying to keep up with “Le Marché Commun,” the Common Market.) Johnson’s Brussels is a warren of bureaucratic redoubts in which lurk a Ministry of Dangerous Balloons, a Ministry of Tiny Condoms, and a Ministry of Flavorless Crisps. In this theater of the absurd, it never matters whether the stories are true; what matters is that they are ludicrous enough to fly under the radar of credibility and hit the sweet spot where preexisting prejudices are confirmed.

This running joke made Johnson not just highly popular as a comic anti-politician but, for many of his compatriots, the embodiment of that patriotic treasure, the English eccentric. There is a long tradition of embracing the eccentric (though in reality only the upper-class male eccentric) as proof of the English love of liberty and individualism in contrast to the supposed slavishness of the European continentals. No less a figure than John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty (1859) that “precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.” Mill associated eccentricity with “strength of character,” but Johnson has been able to turn it upside down—his very weakness of character (the chaos, the fecklessness, the mendacity) provides for his admirers a patriotically heartening proof that the true English spirit has not yet been chewed up in the homogenizing maw of a humorless and excessively organized EU.

Here we must bear in mind that Johnson really did learn a great deal from his boyhood hero Churchill. What he emulated was not any kind of steadfastness or ability to lead but a self-conscious political theatricality. “He was,” writes Johnson in The Churchill Factor, “eccentric, over the top, camp, with his own special trademark clothes.” Johnson’s use of “camp” is an astute insight—he understands very well the strain of louchely histrionic Toryism that runs from Benjamin Disraeli through Churchill to the intellectual father of Brexit, Enoch Powell. Johnson, too, has “his own special trademark clothes,” albeit that he is the anti-dandy whose slovenly dishevelment is carefully cultivated as a sartorial brand.

Johnson, moreover, uses Churchill to lend his own cynicism and mendacity a paradoxical kind of gravity. In his book, he argues that the great wartime leader

wasn’t what people thought of as a man of principle; he was a glory-chasing goal-mouth-hanging opportunist…. As for his political career—my word, what a feast of bungling!… His enemies detected in him a titanic egotism, a desire to find whatever wave or wavelet he could, and surf it long after it had dissolved into spume on the beach…. Throughout his early career he was not just held to be untrustworthy—he was thought to be congenitally untrustworthy.

This is not just Boris in drag as Winston. It is intended to suggest a crazed logic. Churchill was an unprincipled opportunist, a serial bungler, and a congenitally untrustworthy egotist; therefore, only someone who has all of these qualities in abundance can become the new Churchill that conservative England craves. It is a mark of how far Britain has fallen that, in what may indeed be its biggest crisis since 1940, so many Tories are willing to suspend disbelief in Johnson’s pantomime caricature of the man who gave it the courage to “stand alone” in that dark hour. So what if he has the V for Victory sign the wrong way around?
[...]
In November 2016 he claimed that “Brexit means Brexit and we are going to make a titanic success of it.” In this weirdly akratic moment of British history, most of those who support Johnson actually know very well that Brexit is the Titanic and that his evasive actions will be of no avail. But if the ship is going down anyway, why not have some fun with Boris on the upper deck? There is a fatalistic end-of-days pleasure in the idea of Boris doing his Churchill impressions while the iceberg looms ever closer. When things are too serious to be contemplated in sobriety, send in the clown.

[InsaneApache]

I see the Irish are shitting themselves.

[Pannonian]

I see the Irish are shitting themselves.

Are the Brexiteers here looking forward to no deal?

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Are the Brexiteers here looking forward to no deal?

I'll let you know when I see one.

[rory_20_uk]

I see the Irish are shitting themselves.

They'll be fine. Being a Dependency of a large power is one exchanges sovereignty for protection.

Are the Brexiteers here looking forward to no deal?

More resetting a large bone that has been broken for over 30 years. It'll hurt like hell but it isn't the doctor's fault who resets it, it s those who broke it in the first place.

[Pannonian]

They'll be fine. Being a Dependency of a large power is one exchanges sovereignty for protection.



More resetting a large bone that has been broken for over 30 years. It'll hurt like hell but it isn't the doctor's fault who resets it, it s those who broke it in the first place.

How was it broken? How does your analogy work?

[rory_20_uk]

How was it broken? How does your analogy work?

Over the last 30 years or so - since the previous referendum - what the UK populace agreed to has morphed well past the tolerances that would have been expected at the time. Getting back to where we were is going to be difficult.

Would you prefer that the bone was incorrectly set in the first place?

[Pannonian]

Over the last 30 years or so - since the previous referendum - what the UK populace agreed to has morphed well past the tolerances that would have been expected at the time. Getting back to where we were is going to be difficult.

Would you prefer that the bone was incorrectly set in the first place?

Couldn't the same be said about what Brexit means? Look at what Leave campaigners were promising at the time of the campaign, and compare with what they're promising now. Farage was promising Norway. Fox was promising the easiest trade deals ever. Others were promising single market benefits without the responsibilities. All of them were saying that the EU needed us more than we need them. Now we're looking at no deal. If you want to talk about changes in perceptions, there's been a greater change in what Brexit promises in a much shorter length of time.

Where is the broken bone? If EU membership is the broken bone because of changed perceptions, how would you describe Brexit?

[a completely inoffensive name]

This thread in a nutshell:

Pan: Do you still support Brexit?
Everyone: Yes
Pan: Why, it is going to give us X outcome.
Everyone: I dont see X outcome as bad.
Pan: Why?
Everyone: Here is an analogy.
Pan: No, that analogy actually means Brexit is bad!
Everyone: .......
Pan: Do you still support Brexit?

Every single week.

[a completely inoffensive name]

I'm not even commenting how good the analogies are and what they accurately apply to. Just seeing a pattern.

[Pannonian]

This thread in a nutshell:

Pan: Do you still support Brexit?
Everyone: Yes
Pan: Why, it is going to give us X outcome.
Everyone: I dont see X outcome as bad.
Pan: Why?
Everyone: Here is an analogy.
Pan: No, that analogy actually means Brexit is bad!
Everyone: .......
Pan: Do you still support Brexit?

Every single week.

You've missed out one.

Pannonian: Are the Brexiteers going to take responsibility for the consequences of Brexit?
Brexiteers: It's the EU's fault.

You can see that on this very page, in PFH's posts. Arguably in rory's posts too, but PFH's posts fit the above to a tee. It's all the EU's fault. Never theirs.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

You've missed out one.

Pannonian: Are the Brexiteers going to take responsibility for the consequences of Brexit?
Brexiteers: It's the EU's fault.

You can see that on this very page, in PFH's posts. Arguably in rory's posts too, but PFH's posts fit the above to a tee. It's all the EU's fault. Never theirs.

No, I blame everyone.

[Pannonian]

No, I blame everyone.

Including remainers?